Rod Williams Photography, Black and white photographs of London in the 1960s

As with many other aspiring photographers, my earliest successes consisted of seeing an occasional picture of mine in the ‘local rag' - in my case the ‘Essex Chronicle', based in my home town of Chelmsford. This was at the beginning of the 1960's.

The black-&-white pictures here date from a few years later - from between 1964 & 1972. Most of them were taken in London, where I was teaching English to Continental students at a Swiss-owned language school in Forest Hill, in the south east of the city.

In my spare time, I often roamed the streets with a Leica looking for pictures of everyday life. People were generally more ‘camera friendly' then than they seem to be nowadays, though I always tried to be as inconspicuous as possible. Many of my negatives from those days were unfortunately lost, and although some of these ‘survivors' were published soon after they were taken, others hadn't been printed until quite recently.